The different ends of Never Trump

Jennifer Rubin has attracted criticism from Trump “conservatives” because she identifies as a conservative but objects to many Trump actions and policies.

Jennifer Rubin has attracted criticism from Trump “conservatives” because she identifies as a conservative but objects to many Trump actions and policies.

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Jennifer Rubin has attracted criticism from Trump “conservatives” because she identifies as a conservative but objects to many Trump actions and policies.

Jennifer Rubin has attracted criticism from Trump “conservatives” because she identifies as a conservative but objects to many Trump actions and policies.

Photo: /

The different ends of Never Trump

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Earlier this month Jennifer Rubin, the prolific #NeverTrump pundit who writes for The Washington Post, got something that every columnist craves: a petition against her.

The signatories, a collection of conservatives assembled by the American Principles Project, demanded that The Post cease identifying Rubin, whose blog used to be called “Right Turn,” as conservative or “center right” because since President Donald Trump’s election “she has sided against conservatives on a dizzying array of issues.”

They went on to blast the prevalence of #NeverTrump conservatives on The Post’s op-ed pages: “How can an average reader take the Post’s opinion section seriously when, of its numerous regular columnists, none can be found which defend the policies of our nation’s elected president?”

As an op-ed conservative who opposed Trump and finds some of his policies indefensible, I have a self-interested resistance to this logic. It’s obviously possible to be a serious conservative and still oppose many of “the policies of our nation’s elected president.” And if most of your conservative columnists are hostile to a Republican president, that tells you something about his flaws that simply relabeling all his critics as liberals would obscure.

But labels do sometimes need to shift with political realities. The neoconservatives of the 1970s, former liberals who became Nixon or Reagan backers, eventually accepted the “neocon” description instead of calling themselves “The Real New Deal Democrats” forever. And for an important part of the NeverTrump movement a similar shift may happen, with some other term that’s yet to be invented.

This expectation doesn’t apply to many NeverTrumpers. It doesn’t fit Reaganite Trump-skeptics who hate the president’s temperament but have been pleasantly surprised by his judicial appointments and tax cuts, or younger, heterodox conservatives who regard Trump himself as a bigot but consider his populist campaign a possible road map for the future.

But an important group of NeverTrumpers identified with the right on a very specific set of issues — support for the 1990s-era free trade consensus, Wilsonian hawkishness, democracy promotion — are unlikely to animate conservatism again any time soon no matter how the Trump presidency ends. These intellectuals and strategists aren’t particularly culturally conservative, they’re allergic to populism, they don’t have any reason to identify with a conservatism that’s wary of nation-building and globalization — and soon enough, they won’t.

Along with Rubin I’m thinking here of Max Boot, her fellow Post columnist and the author of a new book denouncing the Trump-era right, who self-defined as a conservative mostly because he favored a democratic imperialism of the kind that George W. Bush unsuccessfully promoted.

People in this camp will remain interesting, as converts and apostates often are. But observers trying to imagine what a decent right might look like after Trump should look elsewhere — to thinkers and writers who basically accept the populist turn, and whose goal is to supply coherence and intellectual ballast, to purge populism of its bigotries and inject good policy instead.

For an account of policy people working toward this goal, read Sam Tanenhaus in the latest Time magazine, talking to conservatives on Capitol Hill who are trying to forge a Trumpism-after-Trump that genuinely serves working-class families instead of just starting racially charged feuds.

For a specific dive into the most contentious Trump-era subject, read my old friend Reihan Salam’s compelling “Melting Pot or Civil War?,” a rigorous, policy-driven argument for more-humane-than-Trump immigration restriction — on the grounds that only immigration limits and a different skills mix will promote assimilation and solidarity, and forestall class division and racial conflict, in the nations of the West.

I don’t know if any of these efforts can pull the post-Trump right away from anti-intellectualism and chauvinism. But their project is the one that matters to what conservatism is right now, not what it might have been had John McCain been elected president, or had the Iraq War been something other than a misbegotten mess, or had the 2000-era opening to China gone the way free traders hoped.

And for anyone whose commitment to conservatism is defined by those now-lost possibilities, the logical turn to make goes left.